Ultrasensitive sandwich-typed electrochemical immunoassay for detection of squamous cell carcinoma antigen based on highly branched PtCo nanocrystals and dendritic mesoporous SiO2@AuPt nanoparticles

Squamous cell carcinoma antigen (SCCA) is one of the common squamous cell carcinomas (SCC) in women, which usually works as a tumor biomarker for cervical cancer in diagnostic applications. Herein, bimetallic PtCo highly branched nanocrystals (PtCo BNCs) acted as electrode substrates to construct sandwich-typed electrochemical immunosensor for ultrasensitive detection of SCCA, by using dendritic mesoporous SiO 2 @AuPt nanoparticles (DM-SiO 2 @AuPt NPs) to adsorb electroactive thionine (Thi) as a signal label. The PtCo BNCs enlarged the loading of the primary antibody (Ab 1 ), showing effective improvement in conductivity and sensitivity. The DM-SiO 2 had abundant pores to incorporate more Thi, on which the decorated AuPt NPs created a great number of active sites to immobilize the secondary antibodies (Ab 2 ), thereby obviously amplifying the detection signals. The prepared sensor exhibited a broader linear range (0.001–120 ng mL –1 ) and a lower detection limit (0.33 pg mL –1 , S / N  = 3), combined with high reproducibility, a low relative standard deviation (below 2.5%) and acceptable recovery (from 98.5 to 110.0%) even in diluted human serum samples. This research provides a substantial platform for clinical diagnosis of SCCA in practice. Graphical abstract